"Beacon on Black Lake" by Steven Daluz
Steven Daluz Website
The name-- of it-- is "Autumn"--
The hue-- of it-- is Blood--
An Artery-- upon the Hill--
A Vein-- along the Road--
Great Globules-- in the Alleys--
And Oh, the Shower of Stain--
When Winds--upset the Basin--
And spill the Scarlet Rain--
It sprinkles Bonnets-- far below--
It gathers ruddy Pools--
Then-- eddies like a Rose-- away--
Upon Vermillion Wheels--
-Emily Dickinson
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| photo from MIT museum, Boston, MA, Sept. 2012 |
What a chill, wettish fall day does to one’s will to
complete the everyday tasks!! Mounds of
dishes may abound in the sink, laundry may lie on the floor unsorted, work of
all sorts and sundry may await at every doorpost, glaring ferociously… and
still, what one wants is a cup of tea and a good book. Or even to start a new project- blogging,
designing works of art, writing poetry, whatever a person’s particular creative
vent may be- or all of them!
On an indoor-sy sort of day when the weather triggers the
restless and mysterious impulses in us, away from the humdrum and toward the
intangible, whether we front an adventure face-forward by pulling on our boots
and coats and striding out into the rain, or whether we escape into adventures
of our own imaginative creation, we dig out our souls and dust them off,
remembering the extravagant grace, the divine touch, which makes us human.
A bit of the vagabond comes out in me. On such days I am likely to prate on about
not being tied down, and owning too many things, and an urge to burn down a
house and run off. (I don’t ever really
have the urge to arson, just the urge to be rid of everything I own; however, I
am fond of exagerration. It is a
venerable tradition in the heritage of English literature).
On such days I envy cats.
Mind you, I don’t like them; I
just envy them. I’m too much of a kind
with them, I think, to really like them.
They are fond of being worshiped; so am I, and there isn’t room for more
than one goddess in a household. But not
to dwell on cats: still, on days like this, I wish I could “walk by my wild
lone, and wave my wild tail” like they do.
Autumn is the responsible party when it comes to referrals
to burning down the house, though. What
a season! Such blazes of wild, living,
rippling color! The sugar maples look
like someone set a torch to them, particularly during the evening light just at
sunset. And Someone has touched a torch
to my soul, too; inside a body I feel just as much afire and awake as the
glorious trees. I want to shake out the
wrinkles in my being, stretch out my pen and write torrentially. What about doesn’t much matter: just to be
writing and alive and hear the rich wealth of words wandering around my world
of thoughts again on golden paws.
You could say this is only the autumn fever; that my real
self will come back tomorrow, or the next day, and continue to do what she
always does: wash dishes, cook meals, tend the hearthstone and all that. But there is this point which I think days
like these exist to bring out in us: our real selves are not the jobs we do
every day, the mundane considerations which we must make daily to earn our
bread and shelter. Our real selves are
what we experience in these moments of many-colored, prismatic essence. But by being brought to remember ourselves in
this way, we light our everyday tasks with a little of “the divine spark;” we
lend our essence once more to our existence, and make it Real.
